This update “officially” marks the end-of-life of this child-theme. Although a lot of optimizations can be done on a theme-level, I prefer focusing on tools like my own Autoptimize, which not only optimize code spit out by the theme but also any CSS/ JS introduced by plugins or widgets.

Imagine you run WordPress with English as default language, but some posts are in another language. Dutch, maybe? Up until a couple of months ago, you wouldn’t really notice anything about that setup. Google might be slightly confused, but us bloggers aren’t really into SEO anyhow, no? But with the release Safari 5.1, Firefox 16 and especially Internet Explorer 10, support for CSS Hyphenation became (somewhat) widely available and if your theme (WordPress TwentyTwelve or its performance-optimized 2012.FFWD child theme for example) has support for in the CSS, your hyphenation would yield weird results because of the fact that the browser uses the language attribute in the HTML to decide which dictionary to use.

The solution, if your theme is HTML5, is to add the lang-attribute to the article-tag if you have something to check the language with. In my case I just had to copy TwentyTwelve’s content.php and change line 11 into:

Twenty Twelve is beautiful but slow, so I created 2012.FFWD. This Twenty Twelve child theme looks pretty much the same as the original, but comes with the following performance-boosting changes under the hood:

Before applying 2012.FFWD on my own blog, I had to do some emergency bugfixing in Autoptimize. Autoptimize is the plugin I use to aggregate and minify JS and CSS (including data-uri magic on background images), but it is currently unmaintained. It messed Twenty Twelve (and hence 2012.FFWD) up severely when viewed in IE7 and IE8, aggregating html5.js into a javascript-file loaded at the bottom of the HTML and loading the IE-specific CSS before the aggregated generic CSS. If anyone is interested in my bugfixed version of Autoptimize (there’s some other fixes in there as well), drop me a line.